Pure on MS Windows

Introduction

This page describes how to install and run Pure on a Windows machine. Already known issues are named and if possible solutions are given. More information about running and using Pure can also be found in the documentation, in particular check the Running Pure on Windows and Using PurePad sections for further details.

Installing Pure

The easiest way to get started with Pure on Windows is by using the "one-click" installer (pure-x.y.msi), provided in the download area. Please note that this is a x86 (32 bit) version of the program, but it will also work fine on all recent 64 bit Windows versions (Windows 7, 8 and 10 have all been tested). The package already includes many addon packages. Some of the addon packages are also distributed separately for Windows, please check the Addons wiki page for details.

As installation directory a path without spaces should be chosen, especially, when Pure is used together with other command line tools (see sections Using The Batch-Compiler and Using MSYS).

Running Pure

The same features and command-line options as for the other platforms are valid.

The following issues are already known:

GNU readline bug for non-US keyboards:

There is a bug in the readline library (see also this discussion thread), used by the Pure interpreter, which sometimes makes alternate-keys on non-US keyboards unusable. If you are observing problems in generating special keys, like []{}\~, you might need to disable readline by calling pure with the --noediting option:

> pure --noediting

Alternatively, readline can also be disabled during compilation of Pure.

interactive help command:

The default installation of Pure is looking for the w3m webbrowser to show the html documentation, which usually is not part of a typical Windows setup. You can easily switch to another webbrowser just by setting the PURE_HELP environment variable. You might need to suround the path to the webbrowser by "" (no escaping like \" is necessary), if the path includes special characters like spaces. It can easily be checked by calling the set command in cmd.exe (the Windows command shell):

Using the Batch Compiler

For windows both tools are available as a binary distribution, so there is no need for compiling them in the first place:

Installing MinGW

The one-click windows installer works fine, but spaces in the installation path should be avoided. The current binary release (MinGW-5.1.6) still has some old versions of the included tools, e.g. gcc-3.5.4, and also some include files are outdated, but it works fine with Pure, so no further manuals updates are needed. Manual update of the MinGW-environment is usually done by downloading and extracting the respective packages from the MinGW-download site (where also the binary distribution can be found): http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/

Note: The one-click installer also adds an update function, which usually overrides any manually added tools, header-files, etc.

Installing LLVM

A binary distribution is available as a zip file. Simply extract the binaries to a path (without spaces, again) and add it to the search path. Binaries for Windows can be found here (choose Mingw32/x86 as architecture).

Compiling Pure

Compilation of Pure is only needed if different compilation options from the msi-version are desired, e.g. no readline support for the interpreter, or if Pure has to be installed into the MSYS environment (see below).
In this case, you might wish to have a look at Jiri Spitz' instructions. For your convenience, there's also a little package with required mingw libraries, dlls and headers.

Using MSYS

MSYS is a kind of "add-on" to MinGW, which provides a Unix- (and Linux-) style environment (sh-tool with a wrapper to map Unix-style path names to the Windows world). Installing instructions and the correct setup of paths, tools etc. is also described here.

Known issues:

Matching pathnames for pure-gen:

MSYS mounts the Windows drive letters, e.g. C:, D:, as root dirs /c or /d, so one can access C:\MinGW also by /c/MinGW or /C/MinGW (MSYS is case-sensitive incontrast to Windows, where C:\mingw would also work). Please be aware that internally MSYS converts /c/MinGW back to c:/MinGW. This can lead to undesired effects for instance when using pure-gen with a pattern-matching option for the target symbols:
pure-gen -s '/c/myproject/myinclude.h:' /c/myproject/myinclude.h
Here the path /c/myproject/myinclude.h is internally converted to c:/myproject/myinclude.h and does not match the given pattern anymore. The result would be an empty pure- and c-wrapper file. Better stick with the original path style of windows:
pure-gen -s 'c:/myproject/myinclude.h:' c:/myproject/myinclude.h
The drawback is that the colon in c:/ sometimes raise further trouble when dealing with other Unix tools...

Fixing install target for "Linux" Makefiles:

Makefiles for the Pure addons often contain a section to guess the installation path:

This fails when using MSYS together with the MSI-package of Pure, which does not have the usual (Unix/Linux)-style path structure, e.g. prefix/bin/pure. This can be fixed by calling make prefix=*whereverPureIsLocated*. A more convenient method is to add a clause covering this case to the Makefile: